Some seasonal previews, such as Time Out New York‘s guide to the “30 most exciting fall films to keep your eye on” and Marke B.‘s schedule of upcoming local repertory screenings in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, are at the very least useful and, at their very best, appetite-whetting—while others actually excite. Such as the roundup of six items Christoph Hochhäusler posted yesterday. Then again, I live in Berlin, but I do think most cinephiles will want to know about this particular calendar.
First off, congrats are in order. The director of The City Below and One Minute of Darkness (part of the Dreileben trilogy) plans to begin shooting his Berlin-set thriller next year. Secondly, he’s landed funding for another screenplay, this one set in a small French town in 1941. Third: September “belongs” to Dominik Graf, director of Don’t Follow Me Around (another Dreileben film) and the impressive TV mini-series In the Face of Crime, among a few dozen other titles, 25 of which will be screened in Berlin’s Zeughauskino from September 1 through 17. Graf, who turns 60 on September 6, will be on hand two days later for the presentation of a book, Im Angesicht des Fernsehens, a collection of essays on his work.
Number 4: Hands on Fassbinder returns on September 15. Five: The new edition of Neue Rundschau will focus on comics and features Christoph’s essay on Hans Hillmann‘s Fliegenpapier and another by Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Barbara, and the third Dreileben film, Beats Being Dead) on Adrian Tomine’s Hawaiian Getaway. And number six, October 5, a discussion of the work of Adam Curtis, whose 2004 series The Power of Nightmares has inspired a performance happening at Vierte Welt on September 20.
In other news. The New York Film Festival has followed yesterday’s announcement of the first round of titles for its enticing sidebars with the news that this year’s 50th anniversary edition will feature two gala tributes. Nicole Kidman will be feted on October 3, when she arrives for an onstage conversation and a screening of Lee Daniel’s The Paperboy, which has been added to the main slate. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez: “During the second half of NYFF, the festival will salute longtime leader Richard Peña, who is leaving his role as Film Society program director and head of the fest’s selection committee at the end of this year. The 50th NYFF caps his acclaimed 25 year run as the festival’s artistic chief.”
The exhibition Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange is on view at the John Rylands Library in Manchester through January 27.
A New Russian Cinema series has begun this week in New York and Fort Worth.
DVD/Blu-ray. Dennis Lim for Criterion: “Most romantic movies are so determined to chart the course of a love story—how boy meets girl leads to happily or unhappily ever after—that they miss the intensity and import of beginnings. But the British writer-director-editor Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011), like its closest American predecessor, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), lingers on the initial sparks of an erotic and emotional connection. As a one-night stand turns into something more, the film captures a truth most others only imply: to meet someone new, not least a potential partner, is also to rethink who you are, an invitation to shape and refine the self you wish to be.”
“Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (newly out on DVD from Cinema Guild) is a truly great movie—a 157-minute police procedural that’s both metaphysical leap into the void and a mournful appreciation of ordinary existence.” J. Hoberman explains why it’s his #1 film of 2012—so far.
Reading. Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s posted his 1973 review of V.F. Perkins‘s Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies.
“The Buffalo and Ernest Borgnine” is a very personal remembrance by Julie Cline in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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